1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to wireless communications and mobile terminals, and more particularly to managing contact information within a mobile terminal.
2. Description of the Related Art
Due to recent dramatic advances in information, communication and semiconductor technologies, the adoption and use of mobile phones has been rapidly increasing. In particular, the role of mobile terminals has extended beyond the traditional phone and evolved toward mobile convergence, to encompass a variety of other tasks. The functionality of new mobile terminals now extends beyond voice calls and messaging to include, e.g., Internet connectivity; TV broadcast reception; music playback; camera and video recording; and contact management.
The contact management function allows a user to manually enter information for each contact, such as the contact's name or nickname, home number, mobile number, email address and postal address. New mobile terminals also provide a contact list synchronization function designed to download contact information saved in a computer or web server to the mobile terminal or upload contact information saved in the mobile terminal to the computer or web server.
Meanwhile, increasing attention has been focused recently on social network services (SNSs), such as Facebook®, Twitter® and Google®. An SNS provides a contact list storage service as well as a contact list synchronization service. A user can send a contact list registered with the web server providing the SNS to the mobile terminal. Thus the mobile terminal can store a plurality of contacts in addition to those stored in a phone book entered by the user. However, when a mobile terminal receives contact information from multiple sources, different contact information may be received for the same person. That is, a problem may arise when contact information registered for the same person with different web servers, is not identical.
Moreover, it is not uncommon for an SNS friend list and thus ultimately a phone book list to grow into the hundreds or well over a thousand contacts. The large number of contacts makes it difficult to quickly locate a contact in the phone book or in some cases to even remember each contact. Thus, under certain scenarios such as those just described, a conventional mobile terminal cannot efficiently manage the contact list.